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I've recently discovered Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, the great American food writer. If you haven't read her, her most popular five books are available in one volume, entitled The Art of Eating. Her prose is among the finest I've read in English ("Prussian as a scarred cheek" is a favorite phrase of the moment), and her works are some of the most emotionally affecting that I've come across in non-fiction writing. Food, for MFK Fisher is the central touchstone for all of life's experiences. In one essay in The Gastronomical Me, she givs an account of her last trip to Milan with her second husbad, Dillwyn Parrish, just before the second world war. During that last luncheon, she witnesses the repatriation of an Italian political prisoner, handcuffed to two Blackshirts. After the prisoner is lead from the dining car, there is a sound of breaking glass. The train is stopped at the next station for an unusually long time. She and Chexbres (her name for Parrish in print) are kept in the car. Later, one of the waiters tells her that the prisoner broke a window and slit his throat on the jagged glass. The poignancy of her awareness of her husband's immanent death from cancer, as well as her description of the final days of a sensible Europe, and its termination are cripplingly well-done. From the central description of a last meal in the dining car of a often-traveled train unfurls a meditation upon death and change clearer and more pure than anything else I've read.
Her style evokes, for me, the impressionistic, languid descriptions of Virginia Woolf tempered by a cynical, sarcastic wit that owes something to the uniquely American voice of Dorothy Parker. Her writing is always centered around food, but it encompasses all of human experience. |
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